• Journal of Science Education
• /
• v.34 no.2
• /
• pp.246-259
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this study was to investigate pre-service biology teachers' perception of the evolution. This study was to compare the views of pre-service biology teachers with no religion with those of christian preservice teachers. Subjects were 77 pre-service biology teachers who enrolled in an university and graduate school of education located in Seoul. The instrument of this study was a questionnaire which consisted of 14 items on 2 domains: the nature of science, the origins of human beings. The key results are as follows. Most pre-service teachers showed highly understanding of the characteristics of science. However pre-service biology teachers still possessed naive views on the distinction of law and theory. In terms of the methods of science, many of the pre-service biology teachers considered scientific theories to progress through the accumulation of observation and experiments or through changes and modifications in existing theories. Compared with the pre-service teachers with no religion, christian pre-service teachers had conflicting views and misconceptions about the origins of human beings. The factors of religion were found to be one of the important barriers which prevent them from understanding the origins of human beings. The results suggested that the education program for pre-service biology teachers integrating the concepts and development process of the scientific knowledges should be effective for understanding the nature of science. For pre-service biology teachers, It is important to understand conflicting views of the christian pre-service teachers who understand creationism as a science.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.36 no.5
• /
• pp.729-737
• /
• 2016

Natural selection is the core idea of evolution that pre-service biology teachers need to understand to solve diverse biological problem. This study aims to investigate the level of Korean pre-service biology teachers' understanding of natural selection by comparing their knowledge with their Chinese, American, and German biology major undergraduate counterparts. In particular, this study focuses on two conceptual components of natural selection (i.e., ecology and genetics). This study used a total 1226 pre-service biology teachers and biology majors' data. The instrument measuring the understanding of natural selection concepts was Conceptual Inventory of Natural Selection, which consists of ten ecology concept items and ten genetics concept items. The Rasch model analysis, multivariate analysis of variance, and univariate analysis of variance were used for the statistical tests. The result reveals that the level of Korean pre-service biology teachers' understanding of natural selection were similar with Chinese undergraduates' understanding and significantly lower than American and German undergraduates.' In the first year student data, the level of genetics concept of Korean pre-service biology teachers were significantly lower than Chinese and German students. In the fourth year student data, the level of ecology concept of Korean pre-service biology teachers were significantly lower than American and German students. Based on these results, the ecology concept education and balanced natural selection concept education are discussed.

• The Mathematical Education
• /
• v.42 no.1
• /
• pp.11-18
• /
• 2003

One of the terms that are most often used in mathematics classrooms by either teachers or students might be about 'understanding' of mathematical concepts. Although 'understanding' in mathematics teaching and learning has been highly emphasized by many people, there is no exact and undebatable definition of 'understanding' as of yet. This paper tries to contribute to unfolding the meaning and the structure of understanding in mathematics education along with various literature and finally enhance our understanding of 'understanding' in mathematics education.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.343-356
• /
• 2004

The study aimed to assess the effectiveness of Korea-Israel science teachers inservice program. Thirty science teachers who participated in the inservice program responded to pre- and post tests of the survey instrument on (a) their perceptions to creativity fostering science education and understandings of current education status and reform movement, (b) degrees of changes about understanding of creativity and implementing teaching methods for fostering creativity before and after the program, and (c) their evaluative opinions on the program. Suggestions for improving the program were proposed as follows: First, a pre-service workshop for the program should be provided in order to clearly realize the essential purpose of the program through increase of participating teachers' understanding of facing conditions of education, school policy, reform movement toward science education fostering creativity. Second, for the content of the program, creativity is more emphasized. Appropriate content and sufficient time arrangement for creativity will develop teachers' conceptual understanding of creativity in depth. Third, classroom observation of exemplary science teaching for fostering creativity should be sufficiently arranged. Fourth, amount of content and time allotment to Israel culture, religion, and education system should be reduced.

• Journal of Korean Elementary Science Education
• /
• v.33 no.1
• /
• pp.172-180
• /
• 2014

The first purpose of this study is to distinguish difficult chapters in 'Speed of objects' chapter and find the factors which give difficulty to the teachers and students. Also, it attempts to compare the students' assessment scores with the degree of difficulty in teaching and also with the degree of difficulty in learning. This report is expected to help science teachers develop their PCK(Pedagogical Content Knowledge) for teaching the chapter professionally. 15 teachers who had taught the 'Speed of Objects' chapter and their 386 students took part in the survey to acquire information about the difficulties in teaching and learning. 386 students also received a test to examine their understandings of the chapter. The results of this study are as follow; First, the degree of teachers' and students' difficulty is only affected by the contents, and the degree of onerousness felt by teachers is higher than that of students. Second, The topics caused higher difficulty to teachers were 'Understanding the meaning of motion(2nd lesson)', 'Understanding the meaning and unit of speed(5th lesson)', 'Changing unit of speed(6th lesson)', 'Drawing a distance-time graph(7th lesson)', and 'Understanding the relative motion(10th). The topics that led higher difficulty to students were the contents of 5th, 6th, and 7th lessons. Third, the 'Speed of Objects' chapter can be divided into 4 types of difficulty according to the degree of teaching and learning; 'Strong difficulty', 'Learning difficulty', 'Weak difficulty', and 'Teaching difficulty'. Last, students showed low achievement to the tasks that were related with 'Strong difficulty' and 'Teaching difficulty'.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
• /
• v.54 no.6
• /
• pp.787-798
• /
• 2010

We compared the understanding of 4 pre-service teachers of chemistry education major and 2 pre-service teachers of chemistry major related to conceptions of "properties of dilute solutions" chapter in high school Chemistry II textbooks. As results, few pre-service teachers understood fully the concepts of high school Chemistry II textbooks. Some pre-service teachers had misconceptions related to properties of dilute solutions. We found that few differences existed between the pre-service teachers' understanding regardless of whether they took a major in chemistry education of a education college or a major in chemistry of noneducation college. Most of the pre-service teachers who attended this research recognized the lack of practical knowledge in their pre-service teacher curriculum.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
• /
• v.52 no.6
• /
• pp.696-702
• /
• 2008

• School Mathematics
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.445-469
• /
• 2014

This study aims to examine secondary mathematics teachers' understanding of the levels of cognitive demand on mathematical tasks suggested in mathematics textbooks. The study also attempts to investigate whether the teachers are able to characterize the tasks accordingly and to change low level tasks to high level ones. For this purpose, we developed a survey and 50 secondary mathematics teachers participated in the survey. The findings from the data analysis suggest that 59 percent of the teachers selected high level tasks as appropriate for achieving the national curricular goals, but about 1/3 of the teachers identified PNC tasks as high level ones. The results also reveal that more than half of the teachers were not able to transform low level into high level tasks and only 4 teachers out of 50 were able to transform successfully. The teachers seem to find difficulty in transforming low level tasks into high level ones.

• The Mathematical Education
• /
• v.61 no.1
• /
• pp.109-126
• /
• 2022

The purpose of this study is to explore how well teachers anticipate students to understand and solve equations. For this purpose, a questionnaire of the equal sign was developed, and 20 fourth-grade classes were selected as research participants. Teachers in each class were asked to predict various strategies on how their own students would respond to the questionnaire, and a total of 450 students from the 20 classes solved the questionnaire. As a result of the analysis, the teachers could predict students' computational strategies and relational strategies easily but did not fully understand that some students used both strategies or employed incorrect computational or relational strategies. The students tended to use relational strategies better than the teachers expected. They also employed operational strategies more often than the teachers expected. The teachers predicted that students' strategies would be influenced by the types of the problems such as equation-structure items and equation-solving items, whereas the students were more influenced by the forms of equations in the problems. Based on these results, several implications for the knowledge to which teachers needed to attend were discussed so that elementary school students could enhance the relational understanding of the equal sign.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
• /
• v.67 no.6
• /
• pp.441-461
• /
• 2023

This study explore characteristics of teaching orientation and pck of science teachers in online-offline mixed learning environment. Data consisted of open-ended survey, semi-structured interview, class observation, field notes from 12 science teachers. We categorized teaching orientation considering both science education goals and science teaching·learning orientation. There were 8 different teaching orientations such as 'understanding science concepts-lecture centered' 'constructing science concepts-inquiry based' 'applying science concepts and inquiry-inquiry based' 'applying science concepts and inquiry-lectured centered' 'analyzing and judging science information-inquiry based' 'developing scientific attitude-inquiry based' 'developing scientific attitude-lecture centered' and 'developing perception of interrelationships among science, technology, and society-inquiry based'. Teachers with inquiry based teaching·learning orientation seemed to have knowledge of science curriculum specific to online learning environment for student inquiry. While teachers with 'understanding science concepts-lecture centered' teaching orientation appeared to have questioning strategy of checking student understanding and strategy of repeating a lecture, teachers with 'constructing science concepts-inquiry based' teaching orientation appeared to have knowledge of instructional strategies to perform online group activities targeting student construction of knowledge and to replace face-to-face group activities with virtual experiments and individual experiments. While teachers with 'understanding science concepts-lecture centered' teaching orientation did not show knowledge of student science learning, teachers with 'constructing science concepts-inquiry based' teaching orientation appeared to have knowledge of student difficulties in inquiry based learning.